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Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko "In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos" (MIT Press, 2023)
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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A
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about quite an interesting book with both of the authors who wrote it. Now, the book was published by MIT Press in 2023 and is titled Invisible Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos. And key note here, the title is in Visible Presence because we're going to be talking about things that are there and things that are not there and what those interactions and overlaps mean for all sorts of things. For how history is remembered or not remembered. Whose history is this? Official state history is this family interactions. It turns out by opening up Soviet family photo albums, there's a ton of really interesting questions that take us both into the past, but but also have lots of connections to the present. So I'm very pleased to have both of the authors with me, Dr. Oksana Sarkisova and Dr. Olga Shevchenko, to discuss this book. Oksana, Olga, thank you so much for joining me.
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B
Thank you so much for having us. We're really delighted.
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A
Could we start off, please, before we start opening some of these photo albums with a bit of an introduction from each of you and telling us why you decided to write the book and write it together. Oksana, maybe you can start.
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C
Yes. Thank you so much on my part as well. I'm Oksana Sarkisova. I'm research fellow at Blinken Open Site Archives at Central European University, historian and sociologist by training, and I research and write on visual material, primarily documentary, cinema and amateur photography. I also teach in the field of visual studies, also documentary, cinema and film history. And this book was our joint and very much long and excited adventure that we've been engaged for since early 2000s, from 2005 onwards, for 17 years in the making. And we are very happy to now have it in the book format by 2023.
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A
That's a very long beginning indeed. Thank you for that introduction. Olga, what about you?
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B
So, my name is Olga Shevchenko. I also am a sociologist by training, and I teach in a joint department of anthropology and sociology in a small college in Massachusetts called Williams College, where I teach classes that range on topics from social theory to Soviet and post Soviet societies, as well as memory, photography, and sociology of culture. My first book was dedicated to everyday life in the midst of post Soviet social change. And so after that book, much of our conversations with Oksana had to do with the points in which our interests intersect. We're very old time friends. We went to the university together back in the 1990s, back when Oksana was also a sociologist by training. And in these conversations, we discover that even though Oksana's work had to do with film and moving image, and mine was purely ethnographic, there's a lot of things that we found fascinating that sort of lay in between her interests and mine. And before too long, we thought that it would be really worth teaming up and delving into the ways in which the past lives in the present, both in ethnographic ways, but also in visual ways. So these visual documents from the Soviet past that linger in the present that are just waiting to be discussed with people through interviews. And this was really the genesis of our project.
- [05:28]
A
Always really interesting when conversations kind of keep going and you're like, oh, wait, what about this? Ooh, what about that? What happens if we put these things together? So definitely lots of ways in which that overlap is already becoming clear in our conversation. But in fact, it's that final point, Olga, that you just mentioned that I'd love to pick up on a bit more about how you actually went about researching this. So can you tell us more about where you got these images from? How many images we're Talking about who you interviewed? What's the sort of methodology and source material for all of this?
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B
Yeah, definitely. So our first, still to be called pilot project, where we just kind of got our feet wet to see if there is a there there, took place 2005, when we basically, I mean, we were really working in a shoestring budget. We didn't have any funding for this project. So we connected with families based in Moscow, which is where we were at the time, who were willing to discuss their domestic photo archives with us and to share some stories that reflect the ways in which their family history perhaps is impacted or examined, amplifies certain larger historical experiences of the 20th century in the USSR and then Russia. We spoke to anyone who would talk to us. Our only requirement of sorts was that we wanted to speak with multi generational families, because from early on we had that hunch that there's nothing predetermined in how people encounter photographs and that everyone meets an image or a family document where they're at, where their experience, their knowledge, their kind of generational perspective places them. And so what we were really interested in were these sort of gaps in interpretation or perhaps sort of wrinkles in interpretation, were the same object, the same document, the same image could be experienced in different ways. And the only way to get at it was to speak to people who share the family archive, but perhaps not the perspective on it, or not fully a perspective on it. And so this early pilot project involved just nine families, where we basically sort of tried out our methodology, tried out the kinds of questions that work or did not work, tried out the ways we were going to record our interviews. We started out without a full appreciation of how complex photographs are as visual documents. And so our very first interviews were just audio recorded. And they were a very useful experience, but they were not so helpful in the sort of the larger scale of the project because they consist of a lot of pointing to things that we can't see. Right. And this is me, and this is my mother, and this is, you know, my graduating class in 1968. But without having those images, that was very little interpretive work that we could do. And so perhaps the biggest thing that we learned in this pilot project was to both video and audio record as well as rephotograph the images that were available to us, of course, with the family's permission. Once that became clear, it also became clear to us that we wanted to make sure that the families are on board with this kind of multimedia analysis from the get go. And so we resorted to a professional sociological survey research firm to ask them to help us with recruiting people who wouldn't mind. Having two researchers armed with three different kinds of recording equipment showing up and more or less moving into their kitchens would be the typical place where these conversations would take place for a bigger part of the day. That's how we proceeded with the rest of this research. Typically, one of us was taking lead in the interviewing part and the other was taking the lead in video recording and then chiming in with question. But we sort of balanced this multimedia research just by relying on each other to make sure that there is actually visual trace to go back to so that we could then triangulate between the interviews and the images that the families kindly shared with us. And when I say shared, I mean allowed us to re photograph it. We didn't take anyone's photo albums out of their apartments, even though we felt like we did take them out of their cupboards. And by the time we left, we oftentimes left the family behind that had a much richer and more enthusiastic sense of their family archive. And so in that sense, we can revisit this theme later. We felt like our work was in very many ways a kind of a participatory action project in that sense. And I'll leave for Oksana to maybe fill in a little bit, just about sort of the bare bones of the what, where and when. In the end, we went into our interview and photo corpus.
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C
Yes, thank you. I'll just add that we actually started these conversations at the moment where people were very much interested in talking about their family history and rediscovering what happened with the earlier generations. In the 20th century, the Soviet 20th century, there was a lot of themes that were not raised or silenced or not talked about. And there was also a lot of. From the 90s onwards, there was a lot of kind of research that people undertook in learning what happened with their own families. So in that sense, we arrived in the right moment where people were very eager to share, but also had a lot of questions to themselves, to other family members, about their past. We tried to a little bit, kind of geographically diversify our span. And we went beyond Moscow to talk to people in five other towns within Russia. Actually, our plans originally were much more ambitious. We actually would have loved to also move beyond territory of Russia to other states which were formerly part of the Soviet Union. However, there were limitations, both logistic and financial and all other limitations temporal one as well, on this research. So in the end, we've ended up talking to people in five different locations in central and southern part of Russia. But even that diversification actually allowed us to see, hear and grasp very, very different dynamics, very different itineraries, very different experiences. And all that then was in a way digested into macro and micro perspectives that we try to keep in the book that is going into some individual case studies, but also trying to look at some kind of trends and some kind of ways to compare how these family stories are traveling from one generation to another over the corpus that is shared within the family. But the stories are changing.
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A
Olga, do you want to come back in?
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B
Yes. I just wanted to add that all in all, we ended up with a corpus of 54 families that we spoke to in these different locations, which translated into 156 interviews. So as you remember, most of these families were multi generational, typically three, sometimes two generations, sometimes four generations. And so it was a fairly large corpus of interviews, over 350 hours of narration, and over 12,000 digital images or photographs from the archive. So just to kind of give you a sense of the scope.
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A
Well, that is a very helpful introduction from both of you about kind of how the project was put together. And especially hearing those numbers and the amount of effort you went into. I mean, goodness, aside from just the fact that your ideas go together nicely, this was clearly a two person project. There was a lot of work that went into figuring all of this out. So that's obviously really helpful context to understand kind of how we can make sense of these images and the stories around them. I think probably the other key piece of foundational information we need is about the amount to which sort of personal photography was a big deal in the Soviet era in general. After all, if we're only talking about three or four photos per family here, that puts a different complexion on things. But that's not really what we're talking about because as you describe in the book, personal photography was pretty popular in the Soviet era. So can you give us a sense of that and what kinds of photographs were a big deal? Maybe. Oksana, you want to start us off?
- [15:12]
C
Yes, with pleasure. Indeed. Part of the reason why we have such a large corpus to work with is because there was a lot of interest in photography and in the image making. And in that sense, it's not all that different from other countries. The private archives are really large. We haven't found any single family that would not have a private photo archive. But these archives were very heterogeneous. So in that sense, a real breakthrough and a real exponential Growth in private photographic production happened in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. It was connected to the expansion of the production of private cameras and also availability of other equipment. But all in all, these archives, they contain images from very different era, also from pre Soviet era. And in the book we are trying to write what it actually meant to be an amateur photographer and how that image and the concept of amateur photographer in the Soviet context was shaped, how the state tried to regulate and to make use of this movement, at the same time financing and controlling the amateurs and how that impacted the interest in photography and also the variety of images that could be found in individual collections. So in terms of the private photographic collections, as I said, some periods are more and better represented than others. Usually this is from the second half of the 50s onwards. We usually looked at the analog images only. So images that were actually printed on paper and stored in very different ways, they could be in albums, but they could also be in shoeboxes and plastic bags. They also could be on display around the house. And also what, what meaning different types of images had for the families? Because of course, the images that were more rare, the images that came, let's say, from the pre revolutionary period, they had a different status, different importance and different kind of place of pride in the families very often. And we also tried to talk and understand that what kind of photographs were preserved and in what way. And of course moving into the, or experiencing the digital turn. As we were doing this research, we also saw that a lot of these images acquire new life with the digitization and with different routes of circulation that they take once turning digital. But the analog images were in the focus of our attention for that book. And certainly there were a lot of, a lot of archives that contained also images that were not always amateur images. So it's also very important to emphasize that private archives are heterogeneous. They include images that were done also by professional photographers in the studio. They also include some images from vacations done by photographers who are itinerants and who are offering their services in that sense. We also try to make sense of this heterogeneity. In the book.
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A
That's very helpful to understand. Olga, was there anything you wanted to.
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B
Add, just maybe to emphasize something that Oksana said, which is that family photographic archive is perhaps the most universal of archives left after the USSR's collapse. And in that sense, it's a body of images that feels almost instantaneously familiar and relatable to a lot of people who have lived through that history. Oksana and I have made several presentations of the book after the book came out, and we usually would have a slideshow of photographs running behind us from the archive that we've built up while we were doing this research. And one of our audience members said very perceptively after the presentation, she said, you know, it was very interesting to listen to you, but I kept distracted, being distracted by the photos because I kept waiting to see my parents on the screen because of how familiar in some ways these photographs felt. And I think this sense of familiarity and instant recognition is something that's really fundamental to the power that these photographs still have.
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A
Yeah, that's definitely worth emphasizing. Obviously, that is the massive downside of doing this as a podcast, in that we cannot have a slideshow like that as part of it. But to confirm to listeners, I've had the pleasure of the physical book, and there are so many images of which, even if you don't have Soviet family, like, just a lot of the family dynamics that come through in these photos are very familiar feeling, but also in many ways, very different. So I wonder if we can talk a bit more about what a Soviet family photo album was like. What kinds of, for example, images or stories did you tend to encounter not just in one family, but kind of in lots of different families across the interviews you did? Perhaps, Olga, you can start us off on this.
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B
Yes, and it's actually a very difficult question in the best way because it taps into the real sort of intrigue of this project on a certain level. There is no one typical Soviet family photo album. We encountered an enormous range in terms of thematics. Some family albums are all purely dedicated to travel. For example, families who had an active photographer in their midst tend to have, unsurprisingly, a much larger output, and their photographs have a lot more of A kind of amateur home mode aesthetics would be what anthropologist Richard Chalfon would describe it as. Whereas families that didn't have an active practicing photographer mostly have an album that ostensibly consists of photographs received from various photo studios or workplace photographs, or photographs that were shared perhaps by someone in their network who did have access to a camera. So it would translate into a very different kind of composition. And they would be much more portrait heavy, for example, and would have fewer of these sort of everyday, informal snapshots. So on that level, they're extremely diverse. Sometimes the photographs that we ended up seeing when we met the families that wanted to share their family archive with us wouldn't even be recognizable as a family album to sort of really anyone. So our early chapter in the book starts from a story of a man who we call Konstantin Petrovich, who was a military man throughout Soviet history. And he welcomed us by offering to guide us through what he considered his family album. But it really was an album of his basically sort of socially useful work. He was working after his retirement as an instructor in a youth fishing club in one of Moscow's outer boroughs. And the album really was dedicated to his community work. It opened with a dedication to an anniversary of October Socialist revolution. It had sort of inspirational quotes interspersed with photographs. And when we paused for a second and asked him if he considered it a family album, he smiled and said, well, in some ways it's not, in other ways it is. And it was really an invitation for us to think about the notion of family and family photography as being unusually expansive in some ways in the Soviet context. The line itself between sort of recognizably sort of public minded photography and family photography being a lot fuzzier and helped us to realize that even in albums that look perhaps a little bit more recognizably like a family photo album, there are lots of photographs that really.
- [24:58]
C
You.
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B
Know, tap into people's workplaces that depict much larger collectives, and in that sense include a lot of people who are ostensibly strangers to the people who own the album and yet are enshrined in this family record. And that in itself is a feature of Soviet domestic photography that's worth engaging with and making sense of.
- [25:27]
A
Yeah, that's really fascinating to think about what sorts of definitions are being used and how. Oksana, was there anything you wanted to add further?
- [25:35]
C
Just really to emphasize that the boundary between the private and public is very blurred, and it's a very inclusive and also very heterogeneous, what is usually perceived as a family photo album. So not just in terms of the providence of the images that they could come from, you know, studio made by official photographer and so on, but also the communities that are represented there are very often way beyond what could be identified, what is identified by even the people we talk to as their family. But that's kind of a very naturalized feature of these albums. They are not perceived as not falling within the kind of private sphere because of that. They're not perceived as not family because of this collectivities and multiple types of communities that are represented on these images.
- [26:30]
A
Okay, I'm very glad we have established that. In terms of the types of people who are in the images, what about the periods of history that are represented? Do we, for example, see kind of different periods of 20th century Russian history equally represented? Or do we see more times included as opposed to others, perhaps? Oksana, you want to continue?
- [26:54]
C
Sure. Yes. It has to do with the dynamic of the image production. And as we've already touched upon that from mid-1950s onwards, there's really an expansion of image production also in private archives. It is translated into a much larger numbers of photographs that would be available. It doesn't necessarily mean that the types of activities or types of images would be significantly different, but at the same time, we do see some kind of connections between the periods of social upheavals and calamities and serious and very often traumatic experiences that leave less traces in the family archives. So speaking of the Soviet periods, the 1920s and 1940s, for example, would be much less represented than the post Second World War periods, but by and large, large. So there is an exponential growth in numbers from that period onwards. But there is also a lot of images that are actually made in house, if I can use this expression, because the expansion of the equipment production not only translated in the larger, higher numbers of cameras, but also that the whole process could be done. The whole developing and printing process could also be easier done at home. And a lot of the photo amateurs undertook the whole production cycle on themselves. So it was not just the logic of pushing the button and then sending the rolls to studio to do the rest elsewhere, but a lot of the photo amateurs actually produced the images for themselves and for their immediate environments that resulted in high number of images being shared, printed for others as well, not just for oneself. And that also is probably one of the interesting specificities of this kind of amateur photo production in the Soviet Union, that a lot of the images were shared well beyond the family.
- [29:14]
A
In some ways, that goes back to what we were just talking about in terms of kind of who counts as family and not in these sorts of things. Olga, was there anything you wanted to add?
- [29:22]
B
No, I think it's okay, actually. I'm mindful of the time.
- [29:26]
A
Fair enough. I mean, we certainly have plenty of other things to ask about. And actually, Olga, maybe you can start off with my next question. I don't remember now which one of you mentioned very briefly earlier, and I want to pull that strand out, that some of these albums have quite a lot of photos of travel to different places. That. That was often a thing that came up. Maybe you can help us understand why and how that kind of is still remembered today with how Russian politics are now.
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B
Yes, I would love to. And it's true. It's really striking that there's hardly a family that doesn't feature photographs of travel to a recognizably different location from the one that. That the family is based in in their photo albums. Part of the reason is there was a lot of travel and much of Soviet era travel was subsidized by enterprises that people worked in and very explicitly sort of built as an achievement of the Soviet project and in that sense became a kind of privileged site to emphasize and depict. Even families that didn't have cameras would come back from those travels with photographs. Because not only was there a highly developed travel infrastructure, there was also highly developed photo infrastructure in places that were specifically designated either as sites of memory, and there was a whole network of Sites of memory, for example, connected to sites of battles during, during World War II, but also various resorts that would always be an itinerant photographer or two taking very visually recognizable, distinct photos, oftentimes group photos from the very same location or from the very same vantage point onto the landmark or in offering opportunities of individual photography. So as a result, multiple albums owned across the former USSR now contain photos that are practically unrecognizable, that have groups of 10 to 15 people in sort of lined up in several rows in an orderly way with a very recognizable location behind them and an inscription on the front. In fact, so many of them are sort of identical looking to one another that oftentimes the owners have trouble identifying which of their family members actually represented in those photos. And some people we spoke to resorted to either circling or drawing a little arrow to identify which person and the row of identical faces belongs to them or their ancestor. But at the same time, it's important to remember that this kind of photographic infrastructure was necessary, particularly because very few people had an opportunity to Travel as families and take the kinds of travel photographs of one another that perhaps the listeners of this podcast would think about as travel photos. Subsidized travel, as I mentioned, was usually available through people's enterprises. And so typically the subsidized ticket would not include one's family and barring some exceptions of particularly well connected individuals. And so people typically would actually travel by themselves and would not be able to take photographs of themselves were it not for these hired photographers. There are other aspects of Soviet era leisure travel that really is only visible to an informed eye when you look at these photographs. For example, the ways in which travelers were housed, typically in large rooms with six to eight people previously unfamiliar with one another, sort of dorm like accommodations that a lot of sanitariums and resort locations offered to their customers. And so some of those sort of less glamorous, perhaps aspects of travel are much less visible when you look at these photographs, unless you're looking at them with someone who is willing to reminisce about those everyday details. What is visible is access to sort of visibly tropical locations and the sense of affordability and kind of transversibility of space that from the vantage point of the post Soviet moment, is radically inaccessible. So these photographs tend to trigger strong nostalgic feelings in people, both for affordability and possibilities of travel, but also a sense of ownership of the space that is no longer accessible to them. And as you can imagine, it has a very strong political connotation now that that space actually belongs to independent states that are not Russian, but depicted in the photographs as accessible and in some ways righteously belonging to their ancestors. So these kinds of photographs, as a result, tend to very powerfully naturalize the space of the USSR in all of its grandeur and really downplay the kinds of violence that was necessary to actually keep space accessible to travelers from Russia.
- [35:24]
A
Yeah, and obviously also as you mentioned, brings up a lot of feelings, and this I think is a really fascinating aspect too. You analyzed, of course, the photos, but also people's responses to the photos. So, Oksana, I don't know if there's anything you want to add or tell us further about the sort of feelings that came up when you asked people to revisit these Soviet pasts through these photos.
- [35:46]
C
Yes, just very briefly, maybe that indeed this images generate a lot of kind of power, a lot of nostalgic narratives about those whose experiences this were and who are kind of remembering the times. But I think what is also important to emphasize that this kind of sense of entitlement to space. And appropriation of space that the photos generate also can be picked up by the generations who did not experience it firsthand, but who actually can further fantasize and transform about the benefits of the and transform their beliefs about the benefits of these paternalistic state structures into the narratives that seemingly are supported by these images. So what we are arguing in the book, that these images, which very often represents sites that are out of reach, are becoming objects of desire and also generate sense of entitlement to space, not just in the generations that have experienced it firsthand, these travels, and who can actually reminiscence on the basis of these photographs, but also by those who fantasize and project their understanding of how the Soviet Union was by the next generations for whom these photographs are portals into the imaginary space of the past. I think I'll stop here, but this chapter was a fascinating experience for a. To watch how these images are effectively loaded.
- [37:23]
A
Yeah, absolutely. That's really interesting to think about the feelings that are coming up, especially around travel, especially where we're at today. But the feelings aspect of this is a really big part of the book, and it's not just feelings about travel. So, Oksana, are there other aspects of feelings that came up when you spoke to people that you want to tell us about?
- [37:43]
C
Yes, absolutely. Actually, speaking about photographs is a very emotional exercise, and there were a lot of different feelings expressed during our conversations. We asked and listened more than talked, but we actually very much were sensitive to the emotions that it triggered. And they were not just nostalgic ones, because there were a lot of conversations about losses and traumas connected to repressions, dispossessions, and a lot of painful memories that were also triggered by the images. Even if we tend to think about. About private photographs as images that record the moments we want to remember, the moments of pleasure, of leisure, of something very special there. There are a lot of things that are kind of beyond the frame that are nevertheless there in the eye of the beholder. So these conversations were extremely emotional. And we also tried to put it into the book that the effective impact of the images is a thing of its own, to be analyzed and to be engaged with. And also what is shown and what is not shown is also in the focus of the attention of the book and the way we are approaching this family archives and also the conversations about them.
- [38:58]
A
Olga, is there anything you want to add about feelings and what is and isn't there?
- [39:04]
B
Yes, perhaps just to amplify a theme that Oksana brought up, which is the Fact that how people feel for the lack of better word about their photographs doesn't just come out in a narrative. And that was perhaps the biggest methodologically, the biggest takeaway for us from these interviews. I think we started out really thinking about photographs as kind of canned stories and. And conflating stories with narratives. We very quickly noticed that people expressed that they had something to say about images, not just by talking about them, but by touching them, taking them out of the album, framing them. Many of those decisions preceded our arrival to the site, as it were. So one way of getting at the feelings that people had for their photographs was to think about the long history of their remediation that preceded our arrival and to ask questions about how they made choices about which photographs, for example, to copy, enlarge, colorize in frame, paste into complicated visual arrangements, sort of mosaic like arrangements that sometimes, sometimes symbolized family trees, sometimes brought physically distant people together in one frame, and other kinds of decisions that people made as they interfaced with their photographs. And, of course, we also kept an eye out for what happened during the interview, how someone paused over an image or perhaps used that image as a prop, as a substitute for the person they were talking about by taking it out and placing it on the table in front of them, and then getting really deeply immersed in this communion of gazes between themselves and the person on the photograph. This in particular is a really important focus of analysis, this kind of pragmatic attention to what people do with photographs and what photographs do to people. For the lack of better term. It's particularly important in case of Soviet history, which does contain, as Oksana mentioned, multiple episodes of violence, state violence, unexplained deaths and disappearances, and oftentimes very few words to talk about them. So many of the people that we spoke to, particularly of older generations, had a kind of a discourse about why their parents didn't talk much about their background, why they themselves know very little. Some of them continued to be very cautious about what they tell us about their past. And so it's in the actions, it's what they did with the photographs that they actually managed to express the amount of grief or regret or sorrow that they felt about delight that their parents and grandparents may have lived. And I'm thinking about specific examples where, for example, very old, tattered photographs were sort of meticulously reconstituted and pasted on the album as a way, in some ways, of atoning for the generational gaps that happened between this. For us, it was the oldest generation, but really it was the first fully Soviet generation and their parents who in some ways, whose legacies the children had to leave behind in order to fully participate in the Soviet project.
- [42:56]
A
That's a lot there that has to be negotiated about what is or what isn't said. I think a really interesting thing that's coming up in a lot of the things that you're both telling us is that as much as you mentioned, methodologically, these albums, you wanted to have these conversations with intergenerational families. That was a key thing to that you were seeking, but that these conversations clearly sort of developed organically along intergenerational lines even without that stipulation. Right. There were clearly a lot of threads there that were conversations happening kind of even if you weren't sat there. Obviously we can never know, but it certainly sounds like it. So it seems like these Soviet family albums are really still a part of family discussions in Russia, even after the Soviet period. You know, we move into the fall of the Soviet Union. It's no longer all those different places people could travel from now it's just Russia in the 1990s, for instance. Did you get the sense that people were still looking at these albums and paying attention to them? Oksana?
- [43:54]
C
Absolutely. I mean, family photographs are part of the everyday family habitus in a way. They're regularly taken out and viewed collectively on on various occasions. They're also present around the family images in the interior, and they are traveling with, within, but also beyond the private spaces. And another theme that we try to unpack in the book is how much of the public discourse about the Soviet past is actually entangled with the private stories and the way that the family histories will be narrated or are narrated. And the whole theme of transmission, which is a complicated one and non linear and other simple passing of family stories from one generation to another, is also shaped by the changing image of the past that is circulated through various institutional channels, from schools to media. And the private images are playing a role in it. And also these discourses are shaping how families are narrating their own past. So in that sense sense, Soviet photographs are still part of the discussions in Russia, both about the past, but also about the present and how this present is shaping the image of the past.
- [45:21]
A
Maybe, Olga, you could give us some examples of ways that you saw different generations reacting to the same photos to help us understand these ways that the past is being remembered and has been remembered.
- [45:34]
B
Yes, and there are so many examples. I'm maybe going to just sort of pick one or two. So in some Ways both challenging and adhering to stories that children and grandchildren hear from their grandparents is perhaps worth noting. Oksana had mentioned the ways in which photographs get sort of thematized in various public fora or public arenas. One prime example of that are photographs that offer an opening or an invitation to talk about World War II, which of course is as sort of, in some ways kind of a positive identity linchpin for much of Russian politics of the past in the past 25 years or so and more and more so. And so these are the photographs that are actually least present in family albums, but that children who go through the school system recurrently asked to bring a photograph of their great grandfather at this point, or distant relative who lived through the war. And they're very specifically charged with bringing in a photograph of their hero, Right? So this kind of heroic framing is already kind of baked into what we could call a kind of a call.
- [47:13]
C
To performance.
- [47:15]
B
That is being issued over these photographs. And so children, when they go into their homes, they sort of solicit very specifically stories of heroism as opposed to, let's say, suffering or sacrifice or doubt. And in that sense, there is a great deal of continuity that is being very actively manufactured through these kinds of. From these kinds of interventions. But at the same time, the children don't tend to share the same experience of the Soviet past and oftentimes don't share the same degree or amount of apprehension about touching on a sensitive or perhaps stigmatized topic in family history. And what that means is sometimes the younger generation, at least at the time that Oksana and I were collecting interviews, which I should remind, is sort of a different moment in history than the one we're living through today. We're much more willing to think more critically about the kinds of interactions that they were seeing on the photograph. So we tell a story, for example, in the book of. And a retired nurse who spent a good amount of her working career working in a kindergarten. And she treasured a photograph that depicted her instructing the children about maybe 5 year olds, a whole bunch of 5 year olds seated around the table in Basics of Hygiene. The photograph was from the 1950s or so. So the children were all identically dressed, they all were shaved. It was likely kind of a summer all encompassing daycare where children would be sent off for weeks or months on end from their families to be taken care of in an institutionalized setting while their parents worked or otherwise couldn't take care of them. And she had very fond memories of her interactions with the children. Because she saw them as a kind of civilizing process that she was engaged in. And she talked at length about how she explained principles of hygiene to these kids and taught them to be good members of the collective, to not.
- [49:52]
C
Be.
- [49:52]
B
Disruptive in a collective setting, to always put themselves last, and all of these kind of foundational values of Soviet culturedness. Well, when her granddaughter looked at that photo, her reaction was very different. She said, I just want to hug those children. I feel like they all look deprived and identical looking and frankly terrified, and the table's empty and why are they looking so frozen and malnourished? So photographs in that sense are really fascinating documents because there's always what we came to think about as excessive meaning. There is more in a photograph that you can really sort of pin down or control in terms of interpretations. And that to us offered a really powerful promise of kind of fugitivity, of photographic meaning. And the. The multiple untold stories that the photographs contain and can still tell if they're addressed with kind of a richer and more open ended array of questions.
- [51:03]
A
That's a really intriguing example. Aksana, is there anything further you want to tell us about the ways in which Soviet photos continue to be meaningful in Russia today?
- [51:13]
C
They do in so many ways, because they are not only integrated into the private discourses within the families, the kind of storytelling that happens around the table, they're also present in so many ways in the way the 20th century is remembered also publicly. And they also become, just in that last example that Olga has given, they also become a kind of space to authenticate an imaginary past, an imaginary understanding, understanding and interpretation of the 20th century, especially for the generations who do not have the firsthand experience of it. So they really pretend in their capacity to support multiple narratives. And they also, I think, now continue to be meaningful in terms of accessibility and in terms of being able to do all that work through the proliferation on online platforms. These analog images really have a new authenticating and testimonial power. So in that sense, we actually see that the work they are doing and continue to do today in terms of reshaping the image of the past is happening for very different constituencies. And that's also something that we try to touch upon in the book or unpack a bit.
- [52:39]
A
This is really, I think, such a great way of indicating how rich looking at these photos are. I mean, just even one photo, right, pulls out all these many different threads. And so no wonder there's still so much part of conversation, especially given how history is politicized. In Russia today and of course in many other countries too. So I'm sure projects like this could be done in lots of countries with family photo albums. Who knows, maybe someone listening will do something, something like that. But I imagine this is probably the conclusion for the both of you of this project. The book is obviously out. It's been out since 2023. Is there anything each of you are working on now, whether or not it's together, Anything you want to give us a brief preview of or highlight, maybe? Olga, you want to go first?
- [53:22]
B
Yeah. Thank you so much. You saw where our thoughts were going with your commentary because. Because it's true that ever since the book has been out, we've been hearing from its readers about the kind of possibilities it opens up methodologically, but also comparatively so methodologically. My biggest point in pride is the conversation I had with a historian of photography, Namibia, who said that she and her team is basically a date adopting our methodology to think about how private photographs could help them conduct their own conversations with people about family histories of colonialism and post colonial experience in Namibia. Again, kind of on the intersections of the image and these kinds of emotional or corporeal ways of interacting with. With photographs that sort of tell their own stories about the past, but bringing it closer to home. Oksana had mentioned that we had much more Napoleonic perhaps plans about the kinds of locations and families that we could tap into in our interviews. And we're still very much fascinated with the possibility of cross national comparative projects looking at the plurality of now independent states where people living in them still have in their attics and cupboards photographs that look very much like the ones that we looked at in Russia, but that are surrounded by very different narrative of what the Soviet past meant in the national context. And so that would be. I can't say that we're sort of deep into this kind of comparative project, but we're very interested in connecting with researchers across the swath of the former ussr, perhaps even the eastern sort of including eastern Central Europe and Eurasia, to see what kinds of comparative projects this kind of methodology could lead to. So if any of your listeners recognize in themselves a similar kind of curiosity, we would love to hear from them.
- [55:56]
A
That would be very cool. Let me just second that invitation, please. Someone get in touch with Olga Naksana. That would be brilliant. Any other current or upcoming work either of you want to flag or highlight, even if it's not related to the book we've been making mentioning.
- [56:09]
C
Well, there are so many themes that we could not touch upon in the book that still has many threads that could continue unfolding. So we do have several themes and maybe even articles in the making that will still grow out of this research. But as Olga mentioned, the comparative dimension is something that we are thinking about also knowing the joy of collective work and the pleasures with all the challenges there, the pleasures of working collaboratively are actually very strong. So we do think about the next iteration of this project as an expansion of the circle and expansion of the material to be brought into it. But. But in addition, part of the themes that is connected to working with the private archives is the actual archival part of it. So I am also currently now involved with a new collaborative project titled the Activist, the Archivist and the Researcher. And that's again, 16 different institutions working on transnational research on archiving and exhibiting social and political dissent in Europe and there specifically, I'm focusing on audiovisual material, and I'm hoping to take all the takeaways from this research into thinking about the archival strategies in the 21st century.
- [57:44]
A
Well, all of that sounds very cool, and I do hope that this project gets to expand and continue. So for anyone interested in finding out more, of course, the book we've been discussing is titled Invisible Soviet Afterlives. In fact, family photos, published by MIT Press in 2023. Oksana, Olga, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [58:05]
C
Thank you.
- [58:05]
B
Thank you for your wonderful questions.